Score |
103
APPETITE
<p>I left on the last possible day of the year, which I don't think was an accident. I had known for months. I suppose I was waiting for the calendar to make it look like a season instead of a decision.</p><p>I was not carried out. I did not collapse. I had been giving more than I had for long enough that the giving had become most of what I was, and I could see where it ended from where I was standing, and I stopped before I got there. I don't know whether that was wisdom. It was also a man who did not want the life he had built and had nothing else in mind.</p><p>What I wanted was freedom, or something I was calling freedom. Somewhere quiet that belonged to me. I said peace. I think I meant it.</p><p>Here is what I did with the time. I woke early. I moved my body until it hurt in the honest way. I read, and went to places I had not been, and sat with people who did not know the older version of me.</p><p>I was happy there. I want that somewhere in this, because the rest could read as regret and it isn't. I liked who I was. I found out things I would not have found otherwise and I am not giving them back.</p><p>But within a month of leaving one structure I had built myself another, and I did not notice for a long time. Given nothing to answer to, I made a schedule.</p><p>And the schedule held. Nothing failed, nothing frayed, the days kept their shape. Then one morning I was bored.</p><p>I cannot tell you which morning. I was probably in bed. I was probably thinking about what was coming, which is what I did in bed most of that year. I know the hour I left. I do not know the month I started coming back. One of those I chose.</p><p>I did not miss the thing itself. I missed the pressure. The pace, the demand, the questions that would not leave me alone. I had spent all that time proving I could live without it, and I could. I had not expected the proof to come with anything else attached.</p><p>Maybe I don't want peace. Maybe I only wanted a rest and mistook it for a life.</p><p>I came back in the spring. I would not say healed.</p>
10
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